1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for modifying a property of a protein. The present invention also relates to a method for producing a protein which has a modified property, and a method for producing a microorganism which has a modified property. The present invention is useful in the field of microbial industrial production and the like.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
Proteins and microorganisms which have an activity in an environment which is different from that in environments preferred by usual microorganisms may have advantages over other proteins and microorganisms. For example, proteins which are active at a high temperature, in particular, thermostable enzymes, are advantageous over those that are inactivated at high temperatures because they do not need to be cooled to be active. Usually, such thermostable proteins are often produced by bacteria known as thermophilic bacteria, which can grow at a high temperature. Accordingly, when a thermostable protein is designed, amino acid sequences of corresponding proteins within a group of such thermophilic bacteria are analyzed, and commonly observed characteristics in the amino acid sequences are used for reference in many cases. Alternatively, techniques for analyzing three-dimensional structures of proteins produced by thermophilic bacteria, estimating a structure which imparts thermostability based on this information, and modifying the structure of a non-thermostable protein so as to have such a structure, and the like, are employed. Furthermore, a method has been proposed in which amino acid sequences of evolutionarily corresponding proteins derived from two or more species in an evolutionary tree are compared, and an amino acid sequence of a proper ancestral protein estimated to be a protein of a hyperthermophilic bacterium is estimated to improve the thermostability.